A Companion to Assyria
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Figure 23.4 Dur‐Šarrukin (modern Khorsabad), city plan; adapted by the author from Loud 1938: pl. 69.
Figure 23.5 Dur‐Šarrukin (modern Khorsabad), plan of the palace of Sargon II.
Figure 23.6 Dur‐Šarrukin (modern Khorsabad), plan of the citadel.
Figure 23.7 Nineveh, city plan, time of Sennacherib.
Chapter 24 Figure 24.1 Ashur, statue of a ruler, digital reconstruction, probably Akkadian Period, diorite, total H. ca. 1.70 m; body in Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum, VA Ass 2147, head in Baghdad, Iraq Museum, copyright Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Vorderasiatisches Museum; Foto: Fotoarchiv; Bildmontage: Olaf M. Teßmer.
Figure 24.2 Ashur, cylinder seal and modern impression showing a presentation scene and male worshipper facing a bull altar, from Grave 20, Old Assyrian Period, lapis lazuli, H: 2.1 cm; Berlin, VA 5364.
Figure 24.3 Ashur, cylinder seal and modern impression showing a nursing ewe facing a tree, from Tomb 45, Middle Assyrian Period, lapis lazuli, H: 2.1 cm; Berlin, VA Ass 1129.
Figure 24.4 Ashur, cult pedestal from the Ištar Temple, inscribed by Tukulti‐Ninurta I, alabaster, H: 57.7 cm, Berlin, VA 8146.
Figure 24.5 Nineveh, White Obelisk, probably of Aššurnaṣirpal I or II, limestone, H: 285 cm, London, British Museum 118807.
Figure 24.6 Kalḫu (modern Nimrud), wall reliefs showing apotropaic deities and palm trees, Northwest Palace of Aššurnaṣirpal II, Room S, Slabs 20–22, calcareous gypsum, W: 646 cm.
Figure 24.7 Kalḫu (modern Nimrud), Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, black limestone, H: 198 cm, London, British Museum 118885.
Figure 24.8 Kalḫu (modern Nimrud), stele of Šamši‐Adad V, limestone, H: 195 cm, London, British Museum 118892.
Figure 24.9 Nineveh, wall relief showing the king and queen banqueting in a garden, North Palace of Assurbanipal, found fallen into Room S from an upper story, calcareous gypsum, W: 140 cm, London, British Museum 124920.
Figure 24.10 Kalḫu (modern Nimrud), Northwest Palace, Tomb II, view of entrance in 1989.
Chapter 25 Figure 25.1 City wall, probably Nineveh’s southwestern corner. Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room XXII, Plate 8.
Figure 25.2 Irrigated park with aqueduct. Nineveh, North Palace, Room H (BM 124939).
Figure 25.3 Transport of bull‐colossus. Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Court VI, Plates 63–4 (BM 124820).
Chapter 26 Figure 26.1 Panel of bas‐relief sculpture from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh showing the Assyrian camp at the siege of Lachish, with two priests making offerings to two military standards.
Figure 26.2 Panel of bas‐relief sculpture from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib showing the siege of Lachish and deportees leaving.
Figure 26.3 Panel of bas‐relief sculpture from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib showing Sennacherib on his throne at the siege of Lachish, Nubian soldiers submitting, and war‐chariot with eight‐spoked wheel.
Chapter 31 Figure 31.1 Transportation of a monumental bull colossus from the ruins of Kalḫu (in the background) to the bank of the Tigris during the excavations undertaken by Layard.
Figure 31.2 Arrival of an Assyrian bull colossus at the British Museum in London. Illustration in Illustrated London News 28 February 1852: 184.
Chapter 32 Figure 32.1 Bronze statue of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal, designed by Fred Parhad, an artist of Assyrian descent born in Iraq. The statue, dedicated “by the Assyrian people” to the city of San Francisco, stands near the city’s “Main Library.”
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A COMPANION TO ASSYRIA
Edited by
Eckart Frahm
This edition first published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Name: Frahm, Eckart, editor.
Title: A companion to Assyria/edited by Eckart Frahm, Yale University, New Haven, US.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Series: Blackwell companions to the ancient world | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046160 (print) | LCCN 2016050443 (ebook) | ISBN 9781444335934 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118325247 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118325230 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Assyria–History. | Assyria–Civilization. | Assyria–Antiquities. | Civilization, Assyro‐Babylonian.
Classification: LCC DS71 .C59 2017 (print) | LCC DS71 (ebook) | DDC 935/.03–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046160
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Notes on Contributors
Ariel M. Bagg is private lecturer at the Assyriological Institute of the Ruprecht‐Karls‐Universität Heidelberg (Germany) and member of the Centre François Viète d’épistémologie et d’histoire des sciences et des techniques (Brest/Nantes, France). He is an Assyriologist and Civil Engineer specializing in ancient Near Eastern history of technology and historical geography of the first millennium. His publications include Assyrische Wasserbauten (2000), Die Orts‐ und Gewässernamen der neuassyrischen Zeit. Teil 1: Die Levante (2007), and Die Assyrer und das Westland (2011).
Paul‐Alain Beaulieu received his PhD in Assyriology from Yale University in 1985 and held various research and teaching positions at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Notre Dame before joining the faculty of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in the University of Toronto in 2006. He has published extensively on the history and culture of Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE, notably The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon (556–539 BC) (1989) and The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo‐Babylonian Period (2003).
Aaron Michael Butts (PhD University of Chicago) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of America. His research focuses on the history, languages, and literature of Christianity in the Near East, including Arabic, Ethiopic, and especially Syriac Christianity. He is author of Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in its Greco‐Roman Context (2016) and a co‐editor of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (2011).
Greta Van Buylaere (PhD Udine 2009) studied Assyriology in Leuven, Heidelberg, Helsinki, and Udine. At present, she is a researcher in the project “Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti‐Witchcraft Rituals” directed by Daniel Schwemer at the University of Würzburg. She is interested in Assyrian and Babylonian literacy, and the political and intellectual history of first millennium BCE Mesopotamia in general.
Stephanie Dalley is an Assyriologist who taught Akkadian for thirty years at Oxford University, and has published Assyrian cuneiform tablets from Nimrud, Nineveh, Tell al‐Rimah, Til Barsip, as well as Babylonian texts from Sippar and of the First Sealand Dynasty; also translations of the main myths and epics, Myths from Mesopotamia (1989), an analysis of the Assyrian background to the Hebrew Book of Esther, Esther’s Revenge at Susa (2007), and The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced (2013).
Frederick Mario Fales, born in Baltimore in 1946, has been Full Professor of ancient Near Eastern History at the University of Udine (Italy) since 1994. His main scholarly interests concern Mesopotamia in the Neo‐Assyrian period (10th–7th centuries BCE) and range from historical studies to editions of Assyrian and Aramaic texts. He has undertaken, and sometimes directed, archaeological activities in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iraqi Kurdistan. He founded an international journal on Neo‐Assyrian studies, the State Archives of Assyria Bulletin, and the monographic series History of the Ancient Near East (SARGON: Padua). His publications include twelve monographs, seven edited volumes, and some 170 articles. For bibliography up to 2011 see https://uniud.academia.edu/MarioFales.
Jeanette C. Fincke (PhD Würzburg: 1999; habilitation Heidelberg: 2006) has been conducting research on the British Museum’s collection of Nineveh texts for its Ashurbanipal Library Project in the past years, concentrating on divinatory texts and tablets written in the Babylonian ductus. Her work resulted in producing new databases (see www.fincke‐cuneiform.com/nineveh/index.htm) and several articles. Currently, she is chercheur for the ERC project Floriental at the Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, where she focuses on the pharmaceutical series URU.AN.NA from the first millennium BCE.
Eckart Frahm (PhD Göttingen 1996, habilitation Heidelberg 2007) is Professor of Assyriology at Yale University. His main research interests are Assyrian and Babylonian history and Mesopotamian scholarly texts of the first millennium BCE. Frahm is the author of numerous articles and five books: Einleitung in die Sanherib‐Inschriften (1997), Keilschrifttexte aus Assur literarischen Inhalts, vol. 3 (2009), Neo‐Babylonian Letters and Contracts from the Eanna Archive (2011, co‐authored with Michael Jursa), Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries: Origins of Interpretation (2011), and Geschichte des alten Mesopotamien (2013). In addition,
he serves as director of the Cuneiform Commentaries Project (http://ccp.yale.edu).
Andreas Fuchs is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Tübingen and a specialist in Neo‐Assyrian history. He is the author of Die Inschriften Sargons II. aus Khorsabad (1993), Die Annalen des Jahres 711 v. Chr. nach Prismenfragmenten aus Ninive und Assur (1998), and, together with Simo Parpola, The Correspondence of Sargon II, Part III (2001).
Stefan R. Hauser is Professor for “Archaeology of ancient Mediterranean cultures and their relations to the ancient Near East and Egypt” at the University of Konstanz (Germany). He is editor of Die Sichtbarkeit von Nomaden und saisonaler Besiedlung in der Archäologie (2006) and Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900–1950 (2005; with A.C. Gunter), and author of Status, Tod und Ritual. Stadt‐ und Sozialstruktur Assurs in neuassyrischer Zeit (2012). He currently directs projects on burial practices and the art of the portrait in Palmyra and on religion and identity in Hellenistic Mesopotamia. A Handbook of the Arsacid Empire is in preparation.
Nils P. Heeßel is Professor of Assyriology at the Julius‐Maximilians University Würzburg. He is a specialist for the Akkadian scholarly tradition, in particular for scientific and divinatory texts. His publications include Babylonisch‐assyrische Diagnostik (2000), Pazuzu (2002), and Divinatorische Texte I and II (2007, 2012).
Stefan Jakob studied Assyriology, Near Eastern Archaeology, and Musicology at the University of Saarbrücken and received his PhD degree in 2000 for research on Middle Assyrian administration and social structure. Between 1992 and 2003 he served as a staff member of several excavation projects (Tell Chuera and Tell Shekh Hassan in Syria and Qantir/Pi‐Ramesse in Egypt). Since 2004 he has been a research assistant in Assyriology at the Institute for Cultures and Languages of the Middle East, University of Heidelberg. His main interests are Middle Assyrian history and chronology. In recent years he also worked on Assyrian prayers and ritual texts.